The Khronos Group announced that the OpenGL 2.1 Specification has been approved by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) and publicly released today.

Originally introduced in 1992, OpenGL is the industry's most widely used and supported cross-platform 3D and 2D graphics API. OpenGL 2.1 adds backwards compatible enhancements to OpenGL's programmable pipeline including: Pixel Buffer Objects for fast texture and pixel copies between frame buffer and buffer objects in GPU memory; texture images specified in standard sRGB color space for enhanced application color management flexibility; and numerous additions to increase the flexibility of shader programming including non-square matrix support, support for arrays as first-class objects, a fragment position query in shaders using Point Sprites and an invariant attribute for variables to enhance shader code reliability. The OpenGL 2.1 specification may be downloaded at http://www.opengl.org/documentation/specs/.

OpenGL 2.1 maintains OpenGL's backwards compatibility to ensure that any application that has been coded to use any previous version of OpenGL will continue to run on an OpenGL 2.1 implementation. The OpenGL ARB is also developing an OpenGL 2.1 SDK complete with reference documentation, sample code, tutorials, tools and utilities for release in 2006.

Following the transition of control of the OpenGL standard to the Khronos Group that was announced yesterday, Khronos will also ratify the OpenGL 2.1 specification and continue to drive the evolution of OpenGL and the ecosystem of OpenGL tools and developers, including continued support for www.opengl.org -- with industry participation and strong synergy with other Khronos standards.

Graphic Remedy Academic Program

Through a program sponsored by the OpenGL ARB, Graphic Remedy will offer a free one year license to its gDEBugger tool. The Graphic Remedy Academic program will run for one year, during which time any OpenGL developer who is able to confirm they are in academia will receive an Academic gDEBugger License from Graphic Remedy at no cost. This license will be valid for one year and will include all gDEBugger software updates as they became available. Academic licensees may also optionally decide to purchase a support contract for the software at the reduced rates of $45 or $950 for an Academic institute for the whole year. For more Information please go to http://academic.gremedy.com.

gDEBugger is a powerful OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler to deliver one of the most intuitive OpenGL development toolkits available for graphics application developers. gDEBugger saves developer's precious debugging time and boosts application performance by tracing application activity on top of OpenGL to provide the needed information to find bugs and to optimize application rendering performance -- for more information visit www.gremedy.com